Who Would Want to Live Forever?

Everybody seems to want to extend human life. Government wants to do it, with the Nixon's War on Cancer. Women want to do it with their absolute faith in health care.

Glenn Reynolds, the Instapundit, also hails every new news item that promises to extend human life. And now we learn that PayPal guy Peter Thiel has a foundation dedicated to the extension of human life.

OK, I get it. We humans long for eternal life. That's why our gods promise it to us when we die: not only eternal life, but eternal life in Paradise, at least for the good guys.

These people are all forgetting that death is an essential part of life with sexual reproduction. It only works if the Old Ones die off. They must die off to leave space for the Young 'Uns. Otherwise we get what we have now, Old 'Uns hanging on at enormous expense through the good offices of Social Security and Medicare, and blighting the youth of the Young 'Uns who are forced to pay for the support of the Old 'Uns while also trying to earn a living, buy houses, and raise families.

In the old days people died. They died being born, but now we have aseptic neo-natal care. They died as infants, but now we have pediatric care. They died of the usual infectious diseases, but now we have vaccination. They died of water-borne diseases like typhoid and cholera, but now we have sanitation. They died of plague, but now we have quarantine. They died of famine, but now we have global transportation.

They died of heart attacks but now we have stents. They died of cancer but now we have surgery and chemo.

Now people are living long enough to suffer from dementia and just flat out atrophy. And everyone is all agog to learn of cures for Alzheimer's.

Where are the environmentalists? Why aren't they putting a stop to all this nonsense? Why aren't they telling us that all this "progress" is killing the Earth, that extending human life span completely upsets the natural, organic trajectory of human life.

Well, of course, in a way, they are. They want us to stop having babies to avoid "overpopulation." They want us to reduce our "carbon footprint." And 100 years ago, in the heyday of eugenics, they were eager to cull the "unfit."

But they are not crazy. They don't suggest we should stop medical research and cut health care.

Here's my beef with all this. As a 68-year-old, I definitely feel that I'm done working for other people. I'm just too old and crabby, and a full day's work is too exhausting. But then I don't want to live into my 90s and become either physically weak -- so that I can't stand up and walk about -- or mentally weak with some sort of dementia. I'd just as soon be cut off in my mid 80s while I still have some physical strength and still have some short-term memory.

And then there is the question of money. If you are talking about 25 years of retirement, from the mid 60s to 90 or so, who in the world will have the energy and the cunning to manage their money all that time? Don't tell me government: politicians have been stealing from the entitlement "trust funds" ever since they were first created. And corporate pension plans aren't much better.

The fact is that you can't forecast 20, 25 years into the future. Someone has to take the hit when things go wrong. But under the current entitlement system the Young 'Uns are expected to pick up the slack when the forecasts of the politicians turn out to be a crock. When old line corporations buckle under the weight of their pension promises, it is the current employees that take the hit. That is what I call generational injustice.

Really, if we are to extend lifespan then people need to work longer. And that means we need to reprogram the genetic life trajectory so that people keep their energy longer. But would that really be a good idea? Would it be better than shorter lifespans with each new generation stepping up to the bat earlier?

My point is that nobody has really thought through what we are proposing when we call for increased lifespans, let alone living for ever.

Because my take on disease and aging is that it is all part of Nature's organic plan. We are born with soft baby skin and boundless energy, and we die, 80 year later, weak and tired, with hard scaly skin. That's not a process of decay.  That is genes turning on and off. That is Nature's program for our lives. And every generation we shuffle the cards with the wonders of sex.

What happens if we live forever and we don't shuffle the cards? What happens if old geezers hang on for decades and decades throttling the naive Young 'Uns with their cunning and their selfishness?

I will tell you what I think will happen if we discover the fountain of youth and decide to live forever. It will be the end of the human race.

But then, what of that? Every species lives its hour upon the stage and then goes extinct, leaving space for the rest of Creation.

I will tell you what I think about people that want to live forever. They don't have enough children. Glenn Reynolds has one, and Peter Thiel has none. Of course they want to live forever.

But when you have children that seem to be smarter than you are, and when you have grandchildren, and one looks to be a good software developer and one looks to be a good writer and one looks to be a social genius and one looks to be a kind carer, and one looks like a future beauty, who needs to stick around forever, taxing them and bothering and controlling them all to death?

Perhaps Hillary Clinton will have the last word. "What difference, at this point, does it make?"

The Wages of Hubris

According to Wikipedia, Hubris, the Greek word for "extreme pride or self confidence... indicates a loss of contact with reality and an overestimation of one's own competence... especially when the person exhibiting it is in a position of power."

What do you think? Does that describe President Obama and our liberal friends, or what?

And now that President Obama and the Democratic Party are going to Congress for a vote to support a military effort in the Middle East to degrade the ISIS army, you might think that our liberal friends would be a little sadder and wiser. After all, didn't they tell us that the Bush administration's military effort in the Middle East was all about blood for oil?

But really, I don't expect much change. Because our liberal friends are our ruling class. They dominate the culture; they dominate our politics. Only in unusual situations after a manifest failure that even the least engaged average person can experience does the liberal ruling class experience a feeling of uncertainty.

Anyway, they explain it all away by saying that the US is ungovernable and the world is a complex place.

The best analysis of our cultural and political situation, in my view, comes from Dark Enlightenment writer "Mencius Moldbug's" notion of the "Cathedral."

The Cathedral is the state secular church of the academy, the media, the policy analysts and Hollywood.  It even has its Holy Office of the Social Justice Inquisition running around accusing everyone of crimes against multicultural orthodoxy. And then the two parties, following George Orwell, can best be described as the Inner Party (Democrats) and Outer Party (Republicans).

The Cathedral and the Inner Party are one and the same. The Outer Party has to watch its step, because the enforcers from the Holy Office and their pals in the Inner Party are always ready to pounce and punish Outer Party supporters for crimes against orthodoxy.

That's the basic problem you have if you are a conservative and you want limited government and you want to reduce the size of big government. You are up against the Cathedral and the Inner Party.

That's why I say that we are not going to get change just because President Obama and his supporters have run the nation and the economy on the rocks with their reckless hubris, their blind pride and faith in their big government project.

Oh, we'll probably get a Republican Congress in 2015 and a Republican president in 2017.

But that's not the point.

The point is that if you want real change it is going to take a moral revolution. As I've said in recent posts, that means something like the Protestant Reformation or the several Great Awakenings of the last 500 years. You need a cultural and social earthquake that grabs the cultural narrative and starts to push back against the Cathedral.

It all sounds really cool until you start reading a book like The Beginning of Ideology and realize that we are talking about massacres, repression and civil war. That's because a moral argument easily slips into a warlike argument. And then you take up Violence and the Sacred by Rene Girard and realize that once violence starts it is likely to take on a momentum and an energy of its own and engulf everything.

In other words, there is no way we will dethrone the current liberal hegemony and its big government welfare state without huge social disruption and violence, and maybe civil war. Maybe even world war.

It's enough to give you pause.  We conservatives would really like to roll back the cruelty, the corruption, the injustice, the waste, the delusion of liberal big government. We can see the hubris of President Obama and the liberals that has resulted in the adminstration of the Worst President Ever.

But the liberals are the ruling class. They own the state Cathedral of multiculturalism through their domination of education, media, and entertainment. They run the Inner Party, the Demoecratic Party.

And they ain't gonna go without a fight.

But don't worry. There won't even be a fight unless and until conservatives can ignite a new social/cultural/religious movement that inspires people with a new vision of the good life.

So right now there's no need for liberals to worry. Nothing is going to change. Not yet.

So that's why liberals are still so full of hubris. Even as they fail at everything they do.

Dems Governing Like Weasels

So here we are again.  Instead of going to Congress to get a resolution or a declaration of war on ISIS, President Obama is trying to weasel out of it by asserting that the Congressional resolution from the Bush era is all he needs.

What on earth does the president think he is doing? The point of going to Congress is not about some weaselly legal point.  It is that when the president goes to war he needs to establish some kind of consensus from the rest of the ruling class and from the American people that he needs to go to war.

The legal beagle stuff is beside the point.  The point is that when the leader of a nation takes it to war he needs the nation to be united, more or less, behind him.  He needs to persuade the nation that war is necessary.  He needs to get the opposition on board; he needs to establish a bipartisan consensus.

This is not rocket science.  This is common sense.

But the Obama administration has seemed to do everything under a blanket, or with cunning sleights of hand. This may seem awfully clever to the lawyers working out the legal ploys, but it misses the point.

If you are the leader of the country you must lead it. You must set forth what you want to do, win an election, and then do it. You must be on the phone the whole time wheedling and cajoling the great barons of the realm.

And that is exactly what Candidate and President Obama has not done.

First of all, Obama ran as a moderate, which he is not. Then he pushed through his economic stimulus program without Republican votes. Then he pushed through Obamacare without Republican votes.

It misses the point to say: Oh well, Republicans opposed everything the president proposed. Of course they did. That's why the president gets on the phone and buys the votes of the moderates in the middle. Like the ladies from Maine. Only he didn't.

Then he tried to put lefty extremists on the National Labor Relations Board, by nominating them to recess appointments when the US Senate wasn't in recess. Then his Environmental Protection Agency has been run as an extension of the greenie foundations. Then his IRS has harassed Tea Party groups. Then his Justice Department has been used as a catspaw in the liberal race theater operations.

My point is that this means that nothing the Obama administration has done is cast in stone. Because the president never got a bipartisan consensus on anything. Republicans can come in in 2017 and reverse everything, because the Obama administration never took the trouble to persuade and to make its agenda a national agenda.

Yesterday I read a horrified piece about the Democrats' "CATALIST" voter database. It was used in 2008 and 2012 to turn out the liberal base. J. Christian Adams wonders if Republicans will ever be able to win a presidential election again.

Maybe, maybe not.  Technology like CATALIST is all very well, but if you don't do the politics right, by leading and persuading, then you are going to find, in the end, that you have riled up the whole of the rest of America against you.

Rush Limbaugh has a catchphrase that liberals can't admit who they are, because if they did they could never win an election. But with the Obama administration the liberals are telling us who they are in a rather clear fashion.  They are all about gaming the system, using their insider status and contacts, using any means to achieve their ends.  And when backroom stuff doesn't work then they send out the SJWs, the social justice warriors, to bully and intimidate.

Well, I'm reading a book about the French Reformation, The Beginning of Ideology by Donald R. Kelley. It's all about ideological bullying in France in the 16th century.  And it ends up with massacres and a nasty civil war.

That is what liberals are ginning up. That's what they'd know they were doing. If they had any wisdom. Which they don't.

This isn't rocket science. It's time for President Obama to realize that the job of president is to lead and persuade. It is not to weasel.

Peter Thiel's Challenge

I just happened upon a 90 minute video interview of capitalist Peter Thiel -- as in PayPal, Facebook -- conducted by an obseqious Bill Kristol.

I can well understand Kristol's hesitating politeness.  Thiel is an impressive man, who obviously thinks about and knows his stuff. For instance, he writes in praise of monopoly against free competition: "Competition is for Losers." He means, of course, that you want to start a business where it will be difficult for people to copy you and catch up with you. As in PayPal and Facebook. You'll never make much money in a commodity business where a ton of steel is a ton of steel.

Mind you, Thiel talks in a veiled way.  He says that PayPal solved its problems with fraud with a combination of big data and the human factor.  What does that mean?

And what about the new Apple Pay and all the other payments solutions for mobile devices? Are they coming up with something new or merely playing catch-up?

But here is the takeaway for me on Thiel. He says that one question he likes to ask when interviewing job applicants is this:

Tell me something that other people don't believe in. And that's true.

That notion aligns with Thiel's preference for financing opportunities that will yield monopoly profits. It means in many cases doing something that other people think is impossible. For instance, you'd think that the banks and credit card folks would have got into the payments-by-email business before PayPal. After all, money transaction is what they do. But in fact, according to Thiel, they didn't, and the reason they didn't is that they thought that payments by email would be too hard, because of the fraud.

Kristol asked Thiel about his Question? How do people answer it? Usually they don't.  They fake it. And Thiel then went into a discussion of the social nature of opinion.  People just don't tend to stray too far from the herd.

Thiel got me to thinking.  What would I say in response to his question? Here's my first attempt.

Most people don't believe that the free market is just and fair. They think it needs to be hedged around by regulation and government ukase. They think, perhaps not as passionately as the Occupy protesters, that we need a government with a gun to the head of employers. In fact business runs on trust, and the way to succeed in the market place is to make sure that all your transactions reward and amplify trust.

That's not to say that there isn't cheating and fraud in the world. But the way to succeed is to use TIT-FOR-TAT. Trust first, and then continue to trust if the other person is trustworthy. And avoid a "last transaction" because that's when it pays to cheat.

Here's another. Most people think of government as a powerful patron. You want to stay in good with your patron and collect the crumbs that fall from the master's table. But in reality government always betrays you. That's because government is force. It uses everyone that supports it as an army uses its soldiers, as cannon fodder in its campaign of force, in its endless wars, foreign and domestic.

Thiel's point is that you'll never amount to anything unless you've done a bit of contrarian thinking. Because if the herd is ever to change direction then someone has to swerve away from the herd and start off in a different direction.

Here We Go Again With Liberal Malaise

There really is a reason for the Six Year Itch.  After six years of a president even his supporters can begin to see that he's a fool and a charlatan.

So it was with Bush, so it is with Obama. So it wasn't with Clinton because the Republicans, in moving to impeach Clinton for crimes that would have sunk a Nixon, riled up the Clinton partisans for one more assault on the breach.

With a Democrat in the White House the Six Year Itch at the midterm election in a president's second term inspires the liberal pundits to civilizational exhaustion. The job is just too big for one man, they said after only three years of Carter.  But for Roger Cohen in the New York Times it's "The Great Unraveling." No, Roger, it isn't. It's just another routine failure of liberalism. But I get why it would feel that way to a liberal.

Beheadings? Yes, that's what you get when small insurgencies are on the loose because the big boys can't get their act together.

Aggression? Yes, that's what happens when you get fools talking about the importance of "soft" power over "hard" power.

Breakup? Yes, that's what happens when you weaken the national myth in the minds of the people with the cultural Marxist the multicultural myth.

And so on.

So the liberals are demoralized.  So their ideas are failing wherever they are tried. So what?

The problem is that we have nothing to replace liberalism.

Oh, sure; modern conservatism is better all round for America and the world.  But nobody is excited about it. There is no militant movement that is mobilizing a new generation to flush out the old order and replace it with something new. Instead the kids are all riled up about pot legalization and gay marriage.  Squirrel!

It's déjà vu all over again.

Thirty-five years ago in the Carter malaise liberals were telling us that America was ungovernable.  That we were entering a period of decline.  That there was nothing we could do about it.

Then along came Ronald Reagan. He showed that we could revive the economy, could govern America, could win the Cold War.

But what he couldn't do was move the needle on entitlements. So here we are 35 years later and the entitlements are eating us alive, but still nobody dares suggest reform.  The Elizabeth Warren Democrats are even calling for Social Security benefit increases!

If you look back at the great social/religious movements, starting with the Reformation, they were driven by young people, folks like Martin Luther rebelling against their royal official fathers. Young punks like Marx rebelling against their hauts bourgeois fathers. Young punks like the Sixties radicals pretending to rebel against their liberal fathers.

That is what is missing today.  There are no young punks planning revolution.  There are just the dumb-as-posts Occupy guys that are the drugged-up dupes of the ruling class.

Ten years ago and more liberals like Robert William Fogel were worried stiff that the evangelical Christians were building a Fourth Great Awakening that would take out liberalism and its beloved egalitarianism. So much for that fear.

No.  I suspect we must wait for the moment when African Americans and Hispanics start to become "haves" and start to want freedom and responsible individualism and start to rebel against their liberal masters and say "leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities." I don't want your stinkin' free stuff. That quote is from Eric Hoffer.

Meanwhile my work is to think through what the charismatic leader of this future movement will want to know and say.  And I think it starts with the fact that the payroll taxes that fund the entitlement programs are monstrously unjust to a responsible individual who says "leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities."

That's because the welfare state is based on the proposition that the workers give their savings to the government in payroll taxes and the government decides when and how to give it back to them.

Only a person unfit for freedom could tolerate such a system. Give my money to the politicians so they can buy votes for 30 years until it's time for me to retire?  You must be joking!

But that's the attitude it will take if we are ever to reform the current cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful and deluded system.

Marxism, Power and Freedom

Eric Hoffer writes that when the "scribes" are in, working for the ruling class, they are happy to do its bidding and order the lower orders around.  But when the scribes are out, meaning that the government can't afford them after a societal collapse, then the scribes decide to represent the "people" and enter a phase where they critique the ruling class.

In our day, I suppose, the scribes do both.  Our educated elite critiques the ruling class on behalf of the traditionally marginalized and it also delights in expert-ology, commissioning like-minded experts to boost its social theories and create government programs to implement them.

What the educated want, says Hoffer, is "power, lordship, and opportunities for imposing action."

That is why the educated fell in love with Marxism.  It said: the workers are being horribly exploited by capitalism.  Therefore we should give absolute political power, lordship, and opportunities to run things to the educated elite to liberate the workers from their slavery.

In fact the opposite happened.  Wherever Marxism was tried the workers got oppressed and exploited worse than before.

When it became clear that economic Marxism wasn't working, because despite Marx's prophecy of worker "immiseration" the workers were doing better, the Frankfurt School universalized the oppression paradigm into cultural Marxism or multiculturalism. Now any social group could be identified as oppressed and exploited.  Therefore we should give absolute political power, lordship and the power to name and shame to the educated elite to liberate the marginalized from their oppression.

I am not saying here that the educated elite -- the "scribes" -- are cynics.  They are just attracted to political power, and instinctively look and find occasion for political power.  They see the suffering workers and say "there oughta be a law." They look at blacks and women and gays and want to do something about it.  But the only thing they know to do, or want to do, involves politics. And government. And force.

I have been studying individualism over the past year or two, and I keep getting impressed by the radicalism of it. Responsible individualism says: hey fellas, relax! As long as people are trustworthy and obey the law we can dial down the amount of government and just let people get on with getting and spending, producin' and consumin'. Because invisible hand and comparative advantage and man-as-social-animal.

Opposed to this is the eternal human experience that the dawn raid might be tomorrow! We can see this in the current flap over ISIS. People see a couple of beheadings on TV and are immediately convinced that the US is at risk.  All down the ages humans have had to be on their toes against an attack by the neighboring village, seafaring Vikings, or neighboring princedom. It seems counter-intuitive to be able to trust businessmen, or Jews, or strangers.

Hoffer again.

The desire for freedom is an attribute of a "have" type of self. It says: leave me alone and I shall grow, learn, and realize my capacities.

 Right before that he says "people unfit for freedom — who cannot do much with it — are hungry for power." Yeah, as in "power to the people!" and "all power to the Soviets!"

Now you can see what the Marxists and the progressives have done.  They have put themselves at the head of people still "unfit for freedom" and led them on a search for power.

But the reality of the last few centuries is that when people are released to freedom, the ones that want it, they get right to work.  And they grow, learn, and realize their capacities.  It is only the people stuck in the ghetto of power worship that fail to benefit from the world of freedom. In fact, as we have seen, the followers of the educated elite have descended into the most horrible social dysfunctions.

The truth in the Marxist canon is that people that believe in power, the people "unfit for freedom" need some sort of solace to relieve their sense of powerlessness. But the real solution to their problem is to grow them into "haves," help them achieve a modest competence, so that they can live in the world with confidence and vote for the freedom that is the gateway to real self-command and peace with the world.

But the identity politics that the left serves up is a dead end for those that give up their birthright for its mess of benefits.

The Ordinary Middle Class on the "Golden Princess"

ON BOARD GOLDEN PRINCESS IN INSIDE PASSAGE  Cruise passengers, according to John Derbyshire, are predominantly over-50s.  No doubt he's right, and I've been observing these ordinary American middle-class over 50s the last few days as they "come back new" on board the Golden Princess.  I'll tell you what I think.

You don't get to see the ordinary middle class where I live in liberal Seattle.  You only get to see the precious people that drive Subarus and Priuses and Volvos.  Liberal Seattleites are obviously richer and younger and more educated than the Princess cruisers. And I dare say they enjoy more economic security too. Tenure, don't you know.

But you do get to see the ordinary middle class on board the Golden Princess.

It all makes me think how cruelly the ruling class has treated the ordinary middle class these last few years. Yes, things seem hunky-dory in liberal Seattle: house prices are up, tear-downs are starting in every street. But the daughter of an acquaintance outside the magic liberal circle is just getting life restarted after the hell of the Great Recession in which she lost her home.

You look at those folks on the cruise and you wonder how they are doing with savings account interest down at zero. You think of how they probably blame the banks for this. You think of how they are paying much higher health insurance premiums and deductibles.  You think about how these stolid people are coping with the miserable Obama economy.  Can they hope to retire? If they retire will their teacher and health-worker pensions be there when the state and local government financial crisis deepens?

And what happens to them when the Fed starts raising interest rates, probably because the inflationary boom from zero interest rates is causing even Obama officials to worry about the future?

I think that the ruling class should be forced to take a cruise once a year -- incognito, without staff and perquisites -- so they can see and hear what they are doing to the ordinary American middle class.

I don't suppose it will do any good, but it might make them pause in their grand plans for this affordable program or that necessary subsidy.

It's telling that the present Affordable Care Act had a predecessor.  Remember "affordable housing?"  That was the siren song that got us into the Great Recession as all the folks that had borrowed against their houses, desperately trying to ride the real-estate bull, and all the folks that had strained their finances to the utmost to afford their dream house, all those folks went to the wall.

Was it really fair or just to subject these ordinary people to all this heavy financial weather? First they got ripped off because they came late to the real-estate party.  Then their nest egg got crushed when the market collapsed.

Of course, the politicians and the activists and their willing accomplices in the media have persuaded everyone that it was all the bankers' fault.  Really, the old saw about patriotism being the last resort of the scoundrel had it completely wrong. Instead we should say that any politician that blames the bankers is a monster. Because the government runs the credit system and has done ever since the Dutch invented central banking.

Yes, I know. The people voted for the scoundrels; they had it coming. But the whole point of the Progressive movement of the late 19th century of which today's liberals are the residual legatees was that the educated experts and their rational policy analysts would be above petty partisan politicking and crude corruption. Liberals insisted then and insist now that they are the evolved ones, the educated ones, the rational ones. That's what gives them the license to blame bankers and businessmen and racists, sexists and homophobes.

Only it's all a lie.  Liberals have lied and lied again; they have blindfolded the American people and turned them around and confused and misled them. And now the American people are screwed.

You only have one life to live. When the politicians go to the Fed to get them out of a jam as they did in 2008 and in all the years since, it means that the American people are getting screwed; it means that the government is going to get in their pockets and relieve them of a good portion of their wages and their savings. All because of promises that should never have been made by the sort of people that liberals claimed to be.  And the American people will never get their money or their lives back.

If there were any justice in the world liberals would be on the run right now like the French aristocrats in 1792. But since there isn't any justice I expect that liberals will get another couple of chances to ruin the nation before the American people rise up in righteous rebellion.

Of course then it will be too late.